TENNIS ROUNDUP : Despite Cold, Agassi Has No Trouble in Advancing

Third-seeded Andre Agassi shrugged off a nagging cold and hard-serving Jim Grabb to advance to the third round of the Sydney Indoor tournament with a 6-4, 6-2 victory Wednesday.

Grabb had seven aces and numerous other winners on his serve but had no other weapons against Agassi, who gave up only 11 points in nine service games.

“There’s a lot of guys who can only hurt you with their serve,” Agassi said while sniffling and coughing. “Sometimes it’s enough. Sometimes it’s not.”

While Agassi was on court only an hour, No. 1-seeded Stefan Edberg struggled more than twice as long against Germany’s Patrick Baur before winning, 7-6 (8-6), 7-5, and No. 4 Ivan Lendl was tested by Brett Steven of New Zealand, 7-5, 7-5.

Baur, ranked 111th in the world, nearly matched the defending champion shot for shot but wasted a set point in the first-set tiebreaker and eight break opportunities in the second set.

The normally placid Edberg had words with a spectator who shouted in the middle of a point with the Swede serving at 5-5 in the second set.

Edberg lost the point but took seven of the next nine points, finishing the match with a running forehand passing shot on his first break point since the middle of the first set. The spectator was ejected.

“It’s going to take a lot to get me upset,” Edberg said. “He was a little over the limit, I thought. I just told him, ‘You should get out of here.’ He said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ ”

Manuela Maleeva-Fragniere and Zina Garrison were the only highly seeded players to require three sets in the $350,000 European Indoors tournament at Zurich, Switzerland.

Maleeva-Fragniere, seeded third, rallied from a 4-2 third-set deficit to beat Marketa Kochta of Germany, 6-1, 3-6, 7-5. Garrison, seeded sixth, defeated Britain’s Jo Durie, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4.

No. 1 Steffi Graf, No. 2 Martina Navratilova, No. 4 Jana Novotna and No. 5 Helena Sukova each swept their opponents to advance.

Guy Forget, seeded No. 2, slipped past past Michael Schapers of Netherlands, 6-3, 3-6, 7-5, in the first round of a $315,000 tournament at Toulouse, France.

Top-seeded Petr Korda of Czechoslovakia, a finalist at the French Open in June, beat Sweden’s Thomas Hogstadt, 6-4, 6-1.